"As the NSA demonstrated, the attacks came from Russian State Sources"
Who in their right mind would believe anything the NSA says?
In fact, if there are Russian fingerprints around, and we know that the NSA and CIA are in the business of creating false tracks to cover up their activity, if anything we should suspect that NSA is politically compromised, or that it was someone in US intel. that did it.
This is in fact the exact scenario that 90% of Slashdot has been wailing about for years! Yet, if the target is one the left hates, suddenly we become NSA fanboys.
And yet these twits get upvoted. And still don't understand why Trump won. Then criticize the idiot for what isn't even real, ignoring his actual, growing list of serious fuckups.
"who labels themselves "libertarian" but totally signed off on the rounding-up of their political enemies, and declared their trust that strongman authority only takes away rights temporarily"
Classic misrepresentation of libertarianism. There are also real libertarians who criticize all authoritarianism and political deception, and worship no political "saviors."
Irrelevant. Russia has every right to defend its interests. We started this shit, so have no right to judge what they are doing. We asked for it, actually.
There is only one purpose to articles like this, to rally people into accepting the idea that it is necessary to "regulate" all speech.
There are only two choices:
1. Accept that all "information" is suspect, and let people sort it out for themselves.
2. Give up free speech altogether.
If people are so stupid that they can't be allowed to make their own decisions about what they choose to "believe," and require information to be "regulated" to ensure that they always vote in the politically correct manner, then we might as well just get honest and stop this charade of "democracy."
Of course there will be a civil war, and the people pushing this crap might find that they end up being "regulated" as well, straight into the gulags that they probably wish they could be controlling.
I bought about 6 nice Sylvania 3500K CFL years ago, which were fairly expensive, and had several failures within a year, warranting warranty returns.
Whereas, a pile of free CFLs I collected from shopping at Ranch 99 seem to be immortal, even when placed in adverse conditions such as bathroom lighting.
In a real free market we'd still be living industrial age smog and air pollution.
Bullshit. In a real free market we'd have formalized property rights over a commons such as the atmosphere in the form of equally distributed shares paying royalties. Everyone who pollutes would pay royalties into the total pool according to how much they emit.
This would increase the price of carbon fuels according to a real rather than artificial market mechanism, thereby incentivizing development of alternatives.
You have probably noticed that all news about such matters in the USA almost never contains any technical data that can be used to make an actual, informed assessment of its significance. Even worse, it is usually presented in a form such as "3 times higher than normal!!!" or some such jibberish because while meaningless without further information, a scientifically illiterate populace is easily swayed by the apparently alarming fact.
Are you kidding? It would be a CRIMINAL OFFENCE!!!
And no, don't even consider trying to argue about this. There is almost nothing which offends me. The minimization of Hillary's crime which Democrats engaged in is one of the things which does.
I have to endure training about this topic very frequently. Everyone who works where I work knows without any doubt that they would be criminally charged if they even began to set up a computer system outside of the proper authorized manner, and attempted to put classified on it.
"There is _nothing_ more important to a democracy than voters voting with accurate information."
What you think is so important is impossible. Having the government regulate it is even worse.
If people are allowed to vote, they should also be allowed to decide for themselves if the "information" they are getting is legitimate.
Or we can just finally admit that this "democracy" business is a complete sham, because people are not rational and will believe whatever they need to believe in order to fit in to whatever in-group they perceive to be most likely to benefit them. So there is no way democracy can yield optimal leaders.
We would be better off simply having a computer pick the president, the legislators, etc., randomly.
"Whatever it takes, but the truth is above all the one duty we all must uphold." We can't even get agreement on basic facts anymore. The situation is hopeless, and a symptom of a much deeper problem – the scope of government is just too large. If it was less significant, the motive for ordinary citizens to turn on each other would be greatly lessened.
If we were doing it right, politics would matter very little.
Then you are a fool. Because those same intelligence agencies had both the motive and the means to completely fabricate the alleged 'Russian Connection."
What is truly terrifying here is not that Russians and Trump's people may have talked on the phone about how they might change relations if Trump gets in (I can't say I really think this is a bad thing, nor can you state what law such a thing would violate) but rather, that intelligence has become politicized.
Objective intelligence is essential to the security of the nation. It is now impossible to have any confidence that objectivity exists in the intel. that reaches the Pres.
Did they goad Trump into firing missiles at Syria with fake intel.? Are they willing to precipitate a war with Russia just to spite Trump?
There is no basis to develop any confidence at this point that they wouldn't do such a thing.
"As you clap and reward this activity, perhaps you can tell me how many more children were abused and victimized while the FBI was allowing a site to continue to operate that essentially champions such behavior?"
You're not making sense. If they shut the site immediately, they would lose the leads to whomever was engaging in the crime of actual child abuse. Ie, "we must shut this off immediately because distributing child porn is illegal."
However, in the moments before shutting it off, the system itself gives them evidence of probable crimes in progress.
If my understanding of the situation is correct, it seems like they may have done the right thing to leave it on in order to catch actual abusers.
This would be a lot simpler if the law about strict possession itself were scrapped and instead perhaps something such as "conspiracy to commit child abuse" would be the actual crime here, if people are going to a site where they know the images are being produced from actual kids are being abused (not some digital simulation, comics, modeling of teens in bikinis etc., but real, violation of a person's bodily ownership abuse).
"The argument that child porn hurts children during its creation is bogus." WTF are you saying?
"It could be created with EFX that avoided the use of actual children, so the harm would go down." Ok, that's probably true and is worth further research.
Please man, clarify that you don't actually mean that creating porn with kids is acceptable?
Look, I'm not even a dogmatist about this. I don't think digitally simulated porn should be illegal, regardless of apparent age of the subjects. I also don't think Japanese "gravure modeling" should be considered child porn, and therefore illegal, as long as they've got something equivalent to a bikini on AND there is no element of coercion.
And for fuck's sake, we must abolish laws that criminalize the kids themselves for distributing nude selfies of themselves!
Which leads to a serious conundrum: Such selfies or their distribution by the creator cannot justly be made illegal. Thus if they fall into the hands of anyone else, they shouldn't be illegal either.
Thus, the law should focus exclusively on violation of a person's agency through coercion, or the premise that children can't legally consent (and yes, age of consent laws have their own problems which could be improved).
So in conclusion, the kind of child porn which certainly should not be legal is when it's child abuse with photography documenting the crime. If it's not child abuse, it shouldn't be a crime.
I would even, within some limits, accept the premise that if a kid went on their own volition through some process of legal emancipation (to be legally recognized as an adult), then they could be employed in porn if that's what they insisted on doing.
But your statement is ambiguous in leaving open the interpretation that porn created through the coercion and abuse of kids is not harmful to kids.
Certainly not. The criteria for what constitutes "interstate commerce" are strict and narrow, and the federal.gov usually errs on the side of caution rather than venturing into uncertain legal territory.;-)
The answer is called "archives." It's different from backups. I'm working on a script to use xorriso to write only my changed files to BD-R[E], after an initial full write of all my important data (self-created data, financial records, important email dirs, all amounting to only 4-5 GB).
I can even run this several times per hour when doing high value work, such as electronics design/embedded software engineering. The overhead is small, a few MB per session, just to write out a few changed files and a new version of the directory tree. What the disk looks like is a list of directories in the root named according to date+time, plus one named "current." I can swap disks ever day or so, then get interleaved archives, so that even if one disk goes bad, I loose at most one day.
If anything unexpected happened to my files, like being changed without authorization, then I'd see an unexpectedly large write being prepared. I could stop there, and I'd still have everything since the last run.
I strive to make archiving and backups take so little effort, that they just become a habit. There are many strategies one can apply. This was just one example.
In my libertarian dictatorship, wholesale liquidation of corporations for serious criminal fraud would be the norm. For a very few instances. Then no more.
Slashdot Mirror
"As the NSA demonstrated, the attacks came from Russian State Sources"
Who in their right mind would believe anything the NSA says?
In fact, if there are Russian fingerprints around, and we know that the NSA and CIA are in the business of creating false tracks to cover up their activity, if anything we should suspect that NSA is politically compromised, or that it was someone in US intel. that did it.
This is in fact the exact scenario that 90% of Slashdot has been wailing about for years! Yet, if the target is one the left hates, suddenly we become NSA fanboys.
Pathetic.
And yet these twits get upvoted. And still don't understand why Trump won. Then criticize the idiot for what isn't even real, ignoring his actual, growing list of serious fuckups.
"who labels themselves "libertarian" but totally signed off on the rounding-up of their political enemies, and declared their trust that strongman authority only takes away rights temporarily"
Classic misrepresentation of libertarianism. There are also real libertarians who criticize all authoritarianism and political deception, and worship no political "saviors."
"what is being done in the middle east to reduce the conflict there" For that, ask the Russians.
As for what is being done to increase the conflict there, just look at the Americans.
Irrelevant. Russia has every right to defend its interests. We started this shit, so have no right to judge what they are doing. We asked for it, actually.
https://www.thenation.com/article/state-department-says-russia-invading-ukraine-should-we-believe-them
There is only one purpose to articles like this, to rally people into accepting the idea that it is necessary to "regulate" all speech.
There are only two choices:
1. Accept that all "information" is suspect, and let people sort it out for themselves.
2. Give up free speech altogether.
If people are so stupid that they can't be allowed to make their own decisions about what they choose to "believe," and require information to be "regulated" to ensure that they always vote in the politically correct manner, then we might as well just get honest and stop this charade of "democracy."
Of course there will be a civil war, and the people pushing this crap might find that they end up being "regulated" as well, straight into the gulags that they probably wish they could be controlling.
I bought about 6 nice Sylvania 3500K CFL years ago, which were fairly expensive, and had several failures within a year, warranting warranty returns.
Whereas, a pile of free CFLs I collected from shopping at Ranch 99 seem to be immortal, even when placed in adverse conditions such as bathroom lighting.
Toys and vast numbers of commuters who bought oversized homes 1-2 hours away from their workplace, which need to run A/C all day in the summer?
In a real free market we'd still be living industrial age smog and air pollution.
Bullshit. In a real free market we'd have formalized property rights over a commons such as the atmosphere in the form of equally distributed shares paying royalties. Everyone who pollutes would pay royalties into the total pool according to how much they emit.
This would increase the price of carbon fuels according to a real rather than artificial market mechanism, thereby incentivizing development of alternatives.
Those experiments haven't been completed.
"Bush II signed a law requiring use of E12 bulbs in ceiling fans."
Ugh. Ridiculous, big government "conservatives."
You have probably noticed that all news about such matters in the USA almost never contains any technical data that can be used to make an actual, informed assessment of its significance. Even worse, it is usually presented in a form such as "3 times higher than normal!!!" or some such jibberish because while meaningless without further information, a scientifically illiterate populace is easily swayed by the apparently alarming fact.
All "news" is psyops/manipulation at this point.
"it'd be a fireable offence for you or I"
Are you kidding? It would be a CRIMINAL OFFENCE!!!
And no, don't even consider trying to argue about this. There is almost nothing which offends me. The minimization of Hillary's crime which Democrats engaged in is one of the things which does.
I have to endure training about this topic very frequently. Everyone who works where I work knows without any doubt that they would be criminally charged if they even began to set up a computer system outside of the proper authorized manner, and attempted to put classified on it.
The record is clear on this: https://theintercept.com/2016/...
"There is _nothing_ more important to a democracy than voters voting with accurate information."
What you think is so important is impossible. Having the government regulate it is even worse.
If people are allowed to vote, they should also be allowed to decide for themselves if the "information" they are getting is legitimate.
Or we can just finally admit that this "democracy" business is a complete sham, because people are not rational and will believe whatever they need to believe in order to fit in to whatever in-group they perceive to be most likely to benefit them. So there is no way democracy can yield optimal leaders.
We would be better off simply having a computer pick the president, the legislators, etc., randomly.
"Whatever it takes, but the truth is above all the one duty we all must uphold." We can't even get agreement on basic facts anymore. The situation is hopeless, and a symptom of a much deeper problem – the scope of government is just too large. If it was less significant, the motive for ordinary citizens to turn on each other would be greatly lessened.
If we were doing it right, politics would matter very little.
"After Trump has been imprisoned for treason"
You're kidding, right? Do you even know what treason is?
https://mises.org/library/why-...
Then you are a fool. Because those same intelligence agencies had both the motive and the means to completely fabricate the alleged 'Russian Connection."
What is truly terrifying here is not that Russians and Trump's people may have talked on the phone about how they might change relations if Trump gets in (I can't say I really think this is a bad thing, nor can you state what law such a thing would violate) but rather, that intelligence has become politicized.
Objective intelligence is essential to the security of the nation. It is now impossible to have any confidence that objectivity exists in the intel. that reaches the Pres.
Did they goad Trump into firing missiles at Syria with fake intel.? Are they willing to precipitate a war with Russia just to spite Trump?
There is no basis to develop any confidence at this point that they wouldn't do such a thing.
"As you clap and reward this activity, perhaps you can tell me how many more children were abused and victimized while the FBI was allowing a site to continue to operate that essentially champions such behavior?"
You're not making sense. If they shut the site immediately, they would lose the leads to whomever was engaging in the crime of actual child abuse. Ie, "we must shut this off immediately because distributing child porn is illegal."
However, in the moments before shutting it off, the system itself gives them evidence of probable crimes in progress.
If my understanding of the situation is correct, it seems like they may have done the right thing to leave it on in order to catch actual abusers.
This would be a lot simpler if the law about strict possession itself were scrapped and instead perhaps something such as "conspiracy to commit child abuse" would be the actual crime here, if people are going to a site where they know the images are being produced from actual kids are being abused (not some digital simulation, comics, modeling of teens in bikinis etc., but real, violation of a person's bodily ownership abuse).
"The argument that child porn hurts children during its creation is bogus." WTF are you saying?
"It could be created with EFX that avoided the use of actual children, so the harm would go down." Ok, that's probably true and is worth further research.
Please man, clarify that you don't actually mean that creating porn with kids is acceptable?
Look, I'm not even a dogmatist about this. I don't think digitally simulated porn should be illegal, regardless of apparent age of the subjects. I also don't think Japanese "gravure modeling" should be considered child porn, and therefore illegal, as long as they've got something equivalent to a bikini on AND there is no element of coercion.
And for fuck's sake, we must abolish laws that criminalize the kids themselves for distributing nude selfies of themselves!
Which leads to a serious conundrum: Such selfies or their distribution by the creator cannot justly be made illegal. Thus if they fall into the hands of anyone else, they shouldn't be illegal either.
Thus, the law should focus exclusively on violation of a person's agency through coercion, or the premise that children can't legally consent (and yes, age of consent laws have their own problems which could be improved).
So in conclusion, the kind of child porn which certainly should not be legal is when it's child abuse with photography documenting the crime. If it's not child abuse, it shouldn't be a crime.
I would even, within some limits, accept the premise that if a kid went on their own volition through some process of legal emancipation (to be legally recognized as an adult), then they could be employed in porn if that's what they insisted on doing.
But your statement is ambiguous in leaving open the interpretation that porn created through the coercion and abuse of kids is not harmful to kids.
Certainly not. The criteria for what constitutes "interstate commerce" are strict and narrow, and the federal .gov usually errs on the side of caution rather than venturing into uncertain legal territory. ;-)
Not when it's written in Whitespace!
In my libertarian dictatorship, they'd have been brought up on charges of fraud by now.
The answer is called "archives." It's different from backups. I'm working on a script to use xorriso to write only my changed files to BD-R[E], after an initial full write of all my important data (self-created data, financial records, important email dirs, all amounting to only 4-5 GB).
I can even run this several times per hour when doing high value work, such as electronics design/embedded software engineering. The overhead is small, a few MB per session, just to write out a few changed files and a new version of the directory tree. What the disk looks like is a list of directories in the root named according to date+time, plus one named "current." I can swap disks ever day or so, then get interleaved archives, so that even if one disk goes bad, I loose at most one day.
If anything unexpected happened to my files, like being changed without authorization, then I'd see an unexpectedly large write being prepared. I could stop there, and I'd still have everything since the last run.
I strive to make archiving and backups take so little effort, that they just become a habit. There are many strategies one can apply. This was just one example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In my libertarian dictatorship, wholesale liquidation of corporations for serious criminal fraud would be the norm. For a very few instances. Then no more.